To say even that, of course, is to contradict the reams of unadulterated praise that Katherine Boo’s new work has garnered for its portrayal of slum life by the Mumbai airport.

The New York Times ran a piece on the book in its Sunday Book Review as well as its Books of the Times section, by different critics, as well as a third piece on Ms. Boo herself. Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the New York Times, Gandhi biographer, and an old India hand, wrote that it is the “best piece of reporting to come out of India in a half century at least.”

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The Wall Street Journal’s review described the book as “brilliant” and “landmark” and noted there was “something heroic” about Ms. Boo’s reportage.

No doubt Ms. Boo, already the recipient of a Pulitzer prize for her journalism, will now be decorated with non-fiction awards. Ramachandra Guha, author of the masterwork “India After Gandhi,” wrote in the blurb for Ms. Boo’s book that it was “the best work of non-fiction that I have read in the past twenty-five years.”

I read “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” a few weeks ago, a few weeks after it came out in India, and fully aware of the hype, which rarely does a book, or a movie or a play, any favors. I have been mulling it over since, talking about it with other people, arguing about it with some. It is a book that really gets under your skin, like the garbage that is so intimately described. But, for me, it has lingered not for the right reasons.

I agree with some elements of the rave reviews. It is an astonishing portrait of a much-overlooked section of Mumbai — and Indian — society. The protagonists of the book are given extraordinary space to tell their tales, to elucidate their hopes, ambitions, disappointments and frustrations. Their tragedies are rendered in heartbreaking detail.

The social hierarchy of their slum is convincingly depicted: contrary to many portrayals, the poorest of India’s urban dwellers don’t all necessarily strive to get to the top; they mostly just want to get ahead of the people around them. It is an obvious point once it’s made but is worth making again and again — it’s a major reason why the country doesn’t erupt in well-organized rebellion from the bottom.

Random House

A cover of the book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers.”

How dedicated was Ms. Boo in bringing these characters to life? It is already legendary in journalistic circles that, as she notes in the afterword, for a central scene in the book of a woman setting herself alight and its immediate aftermath, the author conducted “repeated interviews of 168 people.” All this, even though only one person actually witnessed the self-immolation by looking through a small hole near the roof of the woman’s dwelling.

Well, that brings me to my chief objection: I wish some of those interviews had been redirected to the other characters and trends in the book outside of the slum, which are held chiefly responsible for the slum dwellers’ collective misery.

Early on in the book, we hear of Sister Paulette, a local nun who runs an orphanage. One of the central characters, a kid called Sunil, who isn’t even an orphan, is said to know the following:

–That he and other local kids received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit.

–Why food and clothing donated for the children “got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.”

–That Sister Paulette turned boys who were more than 11 years old out onto the street if she decided they were “too much to handle.”

Later in the book, Sister Paulette also is accused of selling food donated by airport catering companies to “poor women and children, who in turn tried to resell them.”

That may all be true. Ms. Boo is a phenomenal reporter. But we are asked just to take this at face value. We don’t hear from Sister Paulette, ever. Not even to give her the chance of a pro forma denial.

So we seem to be left with three possibilities: either Sister Paulette was interviewed, confessed to everything she is accused of and has no problem with what was written. Or the author tried to interview her but was turned away. Or Sister Paulette wasn’t given a shot. Either way, it left me wondering — in a book based on giving its main characters the 360-degree treatment — why don’t I know Sister Paulette’s side of things?

Ditto the cops, who are held responsible for a whole slate of abusive treatment of the slum dwellers from petty corruption to torture that will surprise no one who has seen “Slumdog Millionaire.”

Yet who are these cops? They appear to play an intimate role in the varying fortunes of the slum dwellers. But apparently just because they are a step or two higher on the socio-economic ladder, they are not deemed worthy of a fraction of the nuance granted to those they are said relentlessly to persecute.

Of course many cops are corrupt. But are they all corrupt? Are they all bad men and women? What are the strains put on them? Why do they act the way they do? And do they all act that way?

That’s just the start of the caricaturing. Western charities, and well-meaning westerners in general, are nothing but dupes. A local political figure, before each election, “tapped the largesse of a prominent American Christian charity, World Vision” to give the slum an amenity like a toilet or a flagpole.

At another point, we learn that World Vision has tried to give clipboards as gifts to three dozen children it sponsored in the slum “but the clipboards were being hoarded by the social workers assigned to hand them out.”

What do the folks at World Vision have to say about it all? Is there nothing more to say about the sponsorships? Or the amenities? Apparently not, because we don’t hear from anyone at World Vision.

In another example, we are told that when “foreign journalists” came to Mumbai to do stories on women self-help groups, Asha, a striving fixer in the slum, sometimes gathered up random local women to “smile demurely” as government officials talked about “how their collective had lifted them from poverty.” When Asha talked to the visitors about how her daughter was aiming to become a college graduate “the foreign women always got emotional.” Really? Always? Emotional? Wow.

Then there are the companies who have built the gleaming hotel towers and the shiny new airport that provide such a stark contrast to the low darkness of the slum dwellers’ hovels. They are all painted with a remarkably broad brush. The very existence of the new buildings these companies construct, and their out-of-reach-ness for the slum dwellers, is sufficient to make them villains.

The old airport “was a realm of duct tape, convulsing toilets, and disorganization.” In other words, a dump. But, “in the name of global competitiveness,” the government privatized it and a new management consortium, “led by an image-conscious conglomerate called GVK, was charged with building a beautiful, hyperefficient new terminal.”

Too loaded, surely. Aren’t all companies “image conscious?” Was the new airport just done “in the name of global competitiveness?” Would it have been better to stick with the dump?

The broadest brush is saved for the two greatest villains of all, for whom the hotels and the new airport are merely the shock troops: “Globalization” and the “free-market economy.”

If everyone who reads this piece were asked to define globalization, everyone’s definition would be very different. Some might cite the Indian call centers and technology billionaires made famous by “The World is Flat.” Others might cite a Japanese car company making cars for export from Chennai. Others might cite the spread of international supermarket chains like Wal-Mart (except in India, of course, where they are not allowed.) Others might cite the spread of KFC. Ms. Boo’s version is never spelled out. But it appears to have about as subtle a definition as might be used by a masked protester at a G8 meeting.

It is as if just by writing the word we are all supposed to nod and mutter: “Yes, of course, dreadful, quite dreadful.” But wait a minute, what are we talking about?

Consider this: “Among the things that breakneck globalization was changing about India was its sensitivity about its slums.” The next sentence notes that “restless capital” was “looking eastward” after unnamed U.S. and British banks failed in the financial crisis. Singapore and Shanghai “were thriving” but Mumbai had “profited less handsomely.”

This is attributed to the fact that a lot of Mumbaikers are slum dwellers. There’s no doubt that Mumbai hasn’t kept up with the growth in some other Asian financial centers. But could it be because of something else? Like India’s barriers to the free-flow of capital, or its lack of respect for minority shareholders? Corruption in Indian officialdom? The relatively small size of India’s financial markets? Another dozen things?

Capitalism rears its ugly head again near the end of the book: “In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament.”

I took away from this sentence: a) that I have no idea what it really means; b) that it seems to be suggesting that “global market capitalism,” ill-defined as it is, is inherently bad but it doesn’t say how; and c) that somehow life before the scourge of liberalized financial markets and investment opportunities (if that’s what we’re talking about) had been a sort of garbage-infested commune of poor-but-generous hearts willing to pull together in the same direction. Really?

The sense of caricature was compounded by some sloppiness that was just plain disappointing in a book compiled with such painstaking research (see reference to 168 interviewees, above.)

The 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai make a cameo appearance in the latter part of the book. But even cameo appearances should be spot on.

The terrorists attack “the Taj Hotel.” It’s not called the “Taj Hotel.” It’s called the “Taj Mahal Palace” (or even the “Taj Mahal Palace & Tower.”)

Ah, you stuck-up editor types, you might say, especially because at other points the book refers simply to “the attacks on the Taj and the Oberoi.” That’s fine as shorthand.

But how about this? They actually attacked the Trident hotel, too.

The Trident and Oberoi hotels are adjoining. And the Trident chain is owned by the Oberoi Group, the same company that owns the Oberoi chain. So what’s the big deal? Well, next time you make a booking at the Trident and try to check in at the Oberoi, you’ll find out.

If a reporter had written those same lines about such a well-known and well-chronicled event, I would have written in the copy: THIS ISN’T HARD TO CHECK. PLEASE BE MORE EXACT.

In all, we are left with a book that gives readers genuine and revelatory insights into the lives of some people who live at the bottom of the urban Indian heap. But as for a cogent, expansive explanation of what put them there, what keeps them there, what occasionally lifts them out of there and the broader trends and events that shape their lives, we are left wanting.

“Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is an interesting book. It is an admirable book. It is a moving book. But it is not an authoritative book, which is disappointing given the extraordinary detail in it. We see the trees so closely that an ant can’t crawl up an inch of trunk without attracting our intimate attention to its precise path, the size of its steps and the topography of the bark it crosses. But the forest is painted in a messy, monotone, ominous, dark, dark brown.

Paul Beckett is the WSJ’s bureau chief in New Delhi. Follow him and India Real Time on Twitter @paulwsj and @indiarealtime.

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India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.